that in Poe's time it
was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he
wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems
of _The Universe_. After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge,
that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river,--this at
least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above
the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe
for that requiem of despair, the mystic _Ulalume_.

In the little wooden house at Fordham Poe lived, weak and lonely and
poor, after the death of his wife, making daily visits to her nearby
grave,--the grave that is there no longer. He was cared for by
Virginia's mother for something more than two years. Then in the June
of 1849 he left Fordham. Before the end of the year he was dead.

Chapter IX

At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days

A bustling, energetic, but provincial city was New York between the
years 1830 and 1840, the last days of the Knickerbockers. After 1840
it changed greatly, speeding rapidly on in the making of a metropolis.
Looking back now it is plain that the progress of enlargement went
steadily on year by year, but then the changes came on imperceptibly
enough.

To any one who knows the great metropolis of this twentieth century,
it will seem remarkable that Hanover Square was the place where
merchants and jobbers most did congregate, and that the business part
of the city (and that really meant all the town in those times) lay
all below Canal Street. Beyond that was the country, crossed by sand
hills, watered by many rivulets, traversed by roads that led to the
country places of the wealthy or to popular wayside taverns. The main
thoroughfares looked wider than they do now, for they were far less
crowded, although there were busses, and coaches, and drays, and many
other vehicles of a variety that would look quite odd on the streets
of this day, and in fact anywhere except in old prints, for they
became extinct many a day ago. There were no surface roads, no
elevated roads, no clanging electric cars, no bicycles, no motor
carriages, no thousand and one conveniences of comfort and confusion
that inventive genius and modern methods have called forth. To be sure
the first street railroad in the world had just been projected and
the cars were about to run through the streets, but this was not as
yet established.

The architectural appearance of the city